Strategic Entrepreneurship

Strategic Entrepreneurship

From the e-Activity, evaluate the lessons learned in this chapter to determine which single lesson would be most beneficial to the company you researched. Provide specific examples to support your response.

I believe that Regency Energy Partners the most beneficial single lesson would be to increase their level of value-creating diversification by communicating throughout the world with competitors. Partnering up with their competitors whether big or small companies to install their gas services or products within the different communities throughout the world. If this is able to take place Regency would become the most diversified company in the energy world. A lot of companies don’t understand how a merger can benefit them for the good and not always be a bad thing.

From the e-Activity, identify one firm that you think would make a good strategic partner for the company you researched. Provide specific examples of why you think this firm would be a good partner.

A business that would be a great merger for the company I researched would be Exelon Company. The merger between these two companies would be smart because they would be able to take over the big portions of the United States. One company is big on the West Coast while the other is big on the East Coast. The biggest disadvantage to a merging of the two businesses would be the amount of staff they have on hand in the administrative side of things. I would propose that the owners and CEO’s of both individual businesses come together and team up to show the comrade for the merger and I believe that the employees will follow. Also, the two businesses would need to figure out if they will change the name or if one company name is more prominent then the other. Once these issues are worked on the two businesses should strive to create more business and to bring in more revenue.

DQ 2

Analyze the different approaches to innovation discussed in this chapter to determine which approach you think would be the greatest value to the greatest number of organizations. Explain your rationale.

There are different approaches to innovation. Following are the approaches that an organization may want to consider. Focused events or campaigns: helps to generate many ideas and from those organizations select the best one. A weakness of this approach is these events do not create the fabric of an innovative organization. Good ideas may be neglected by the review team. Innovation teams: groups are assigned to create something. This could R&D or other groups. Collaborative idea environments: employees interacting in a collaborative, creative environment to generate many ideas. This type of approach is difficult to use in manufacturing companies. Some employees may not comfortable with this approach. Ad-hoc innovation: supporting employee’s creativity who is working on their own projects. The right culture should be placed in the organization to support employees being independently creative. Ad-hoc improvement activities: generate smaller ideas to make subtle improvements that have significant input than first seen. These improvement activities give rise to innovative workforce. The popular ad-hoc improvement approach is Six Sigma. Ad-hoc improvement activities are the best innovative approach. Smaller ideas are easier to identify and the combined effect of these ideas are very powerful. As a result, the organization may also get larger improvement ideas as a bonus.

Create one innovative approach that is not discussed in the textbook for increasing the amount of innovation within a large company. Describe this approach in detail and explain how companies could benefit from it.

Creating innovative systems and effective transitions to Systems of Differentiation needs a significantly different culture and skill set however. To systematically and successfully create innovative applications and manage the transition for successful ones to applications of differentiation, the organization should in many ways behave like a startup. The more complex and larger organization’s information technology needs are, the more difficult that is for traditional information technology departments to achieve. It is also difficult to be agile and fast when dozens of procedures and policies are in place to prevent unforeseen or unwanted changes to the infrastructure.